Saw a Lifetime Next to Me
by That Girl Six
Summary: They were the first to fall, probably wouldn't be the last, but they were going to give them the right send off -- the kind of send off they had never given themselves. Tag to 5.10


**Disclaimer:** I couldn't afford the copyright, and even if I could, I would still want to share. This one is **rated R** for language and nothing more, as always. I don't normally write tags, but this one was in my head, so spoilers apply through 5.10. There's also a minor tag to 5.08 here. It's Gen since I don't seem to know how to write anything else. / Title comes from Chris & Johnny's "I Am a Lover".

Author's Note: As always, thank you for taking the time, even if you're shy like me and don't comment. Your time alone is appreciated. Happy reading and thanks!

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**Saw a Lifetime Next To Me  
**_by That Girl Six_

I. Bobby

While he waited for them to get home — because that was what this place was, he knew, to the boys, their only home besides John's car — Bobby thought about taking a few shots. The bottle looked awfully inviting. But then he saw the shot glasses that had yet to be cleaned up and the bottle that had invited the oddest threesome he had ever seen in The Bar Bitch, The Headstrong Daughter, and The Angel Without a Side. It had looked so fucking weird at the time, the three of them, but now he'd give both his arms to see it again. They looked good together.

So he skipped the bottle. For now. He would have done up the dishes, but he hadn't done a whole lot of remodeling of the kitchen yet. The car had been the priority, and the bathroom, but the kitchen could wait until the apocalypse was over. Then he'd see if he needed to do the work at all. He would have cleaned up the boys' room so that they wouldn't have to deal with it — they'd dealt with enough the last few hours — until he remembered that the stairs had been one of the later priorities, too. The kids were gonna need their sleep, if they could sleep, but they were just gonna have to make up their beds themselves. They were old enough to do it themselves now anyway.

He eyed the stack of research, but it didn't want him to touch it. A few hours on hold wasn't going to make a difference. Besides, if Castiel was right and Death was out of the bottle, well, there wasn't much research he could do there. His entire adult life had been research on Death. Books couldn't teach him a damn thing he didn't already know.

So he sat there alone and imagined what his house used to look like before there had been death. He thought of the light that used to stream through the windows and wondered if he would ever see it again. It hadn't really occurred to him until now, but it had been a long time since they had seen the light. His wife had loved the light. He wondered what she would think of all of this. She would have loved the boys — you know, if they watched their manners around her. He forgot sometimes how much manners had mattered to her. She would wash his mouth out with soap on a daily basis if she could hear him now. Then again, he had plenty reason for the words that came out of his mouth these days.

Fuck. Goddamn. Goddamn motherfuckers. Pissant little angelic motherfucking shits.

He'd start there, then work his way up.

The house seemed kinda cold. Yeah, it was November in South Dakota, but it had been a mild November. He only needed the heat at night. It was the middle of the day, but it was awfully damn cold in there. It got quiet when it was cold. Of all the things he had learned to deal with in his life without her, the quiet was the one that never quite came along. He always slept with the clock radio on, not too loud but loud enough that he knew it was on. He didn't think about it much since the house seemed to always have people in it these days. Right now he wanted it. The radio in the kitchen was on top of the fridge, and he hadn't exactly bothered to take it down.

A little bumper car contest with the fridge to knock the damn thing down might not be a bad idea. It wasn't like he could feel it.

He'd really like to not feel much right now.

He thought of the boys. Castiel had said it looked like they weren't feeling all that much at the moment either. Dean was roughed up, giving Sam something else to focus on. He'd tried to get more detail from the angel, but Cas wasn't exactly loquacious or, you know, in touch with what the brothers could possibly be feeling. At least they were in safe hands until they got home.

Most of all, Bobby was afraid of that moment when they were going to walk through that door and it would be real. Ellen and Jo weren't going to be walking through that door with them, battered or otherwise.

He thought of the day they'd opened the Devil's Gate and Ellen showed up between the stacks looking awfully battered and skittered all to hell. He would like to see her, even like that right now. There was something kinda pretty about her when she allowed herself to be scared. It didn't happen often, not when she had a baby to raise all by her lonesome, but when she did . . . The fearless momma knew how to do things right. He would like to see that again, too. He'd sat in the corner of her joint once, watching her bust balls on a couple of hunters who dared to speak ill of the dead Mary Campbell (before Ellen ever knew who John Winchester was). He knew right then and there that she was the kind of broad who made life interesting.

He wished she was going to be around to make it interesting a little longer. She had too much left to do.

They all did.

Maybe it was that all three Winchesters had died on his watch, but he had spent so much time being the big brother and the second father that he thought like one, and the only thing he could think was that little Joanna Beth had far too much living left to do. Of all of them, she was the one who had yet to . . . It wasn't like with John's boys. They had seen too much. They were tired, so fucking tired, and they were leading a march to Hell because that was the only thing they had yet to see in this world. But Jo, she maybe had the mouth of a hunter but she had the look of a little girl who had spent too much time sheltered on her momma's lap in a bar and not seen anything of the world.

He got it. The apocalypse was the goddamn apocalypse. It was war. People were going to die. But why did it have to be that it was the kids who died? It was always the kids. _His_ kids.

His wife would have loved the girls. It would have been a contest if she or Ellen drank the other under the table first. Of course, Castiel would have waited them out, but it would have been fun. She would have loved Jo, too. She would have warned her about boys like the Winchesters, no matter how much she loved them. She would have had a smile on her face the entire time she said so, too.

It was insane, yeah, but Bobby kinda hoped Death _did_ get out. Because he'd like to have a little come-see-Jesus with him about what the fuck he was thinking. He'd like to know why Death had a grudge against him. He never did anything to Death. Why the fuck was there a target painted on his back and those of the people he loved?

Dean called when Sam took over driving at the gas station. He said he had to even though Castiel was doing a good enough job for a guy who didn't have a license. Bobby heard Sam say something in the background about how Dean didn't exactly have a license anymore since he was technically dead a few times over, too. He could pretty much hear the middle finger pointed in Sam's direction.

He made them promise to curb the end of the world until they got home. It didn't take any arm twisting to get them to agree. He wished like hell they would get home. He was grateful not to be in the car with them right now, and yet, there was nowhere he would rather be.

This was not the way the apocalypse was supposed to go.

There were still two hundred miles that separated him from his family.

Fuck it. There had to be some way to get the dishes done around here.

II. Sam

From the look on Bobby's face, he could just guess what they looked like. Probably as good as he felt. Then again, he didn't exactly know how he felt. That would mean he had been able to think beyond the insanity and _end of the world_ and _what the fuck just happened_ and _man, we are going to have some real PTSD issues to deal with here between Dean and me the next few days_. Which he hadn't.

The idea that he had stood toe to toe with Lucifer — goddamn _Lucifer_ — and his brother had shot the bastard right in the face was only that, an idea. The speech he'd given Sam — what was it with the bad guys always have to speechify at them? — hadn't really sunk in, which would probably tick the fallen angel off if he knew. But Sam had been too busy trying to make sure his brother was still alive. Yeah, there had been something in there about how they were alike and how their brothers turned on them, but really, what he needed was to make sure Dean was alive. The rest of it would come later.

When Cas had zipped them off to the car and thrown them into the backseat with Dean's head in his lap, it had stunned Sam into a place he didn't exactly want to remember. He heard the hellhounds as vividly this time as he did every single night in his dreams. Dean's head in his lap nearly did him in. Dean falling under the weight of another hound was too much to think about because, really, having to live through that again . . . It worried him that his brother hadn't had all that much reaction to the hounds, not like someone who had been ripped apart by one would naturally have. Yeah, he'd been trying to keep it together for Jo, which, noble as that was, only scared Sam. Now Dean knew what it felt like and what it looked like. It was the stuff even more nightmares were going to be made of.

Even getting home didn't make those growls go away.

No one said much of anything when they dropped their bags at the door. Cas said he had something to do and would be back then _poof!_ he was gone. Dean didn't say anything, instead walked over to the counter, picked up the towel Bobby had left there to come greet them, and started in on the dishes.

He wasn't sure why he did it, but Sam went down to the basement.

He hadn't been down there since that lovely sojourn into detox hell, but it seemed like the right place to be for what he was thinking at the moment. He wasn't feeling sorry for himself, although it would be easy to think that. He wasn't going to sit and sulk and blame himself, not when it wasn't going to get him anywhere. No, he had other things to think about, things to decide. So he parked himself on the bottom wooden step and stared at that consecrated iron door that had held him prisoner and wondered what he was supposed to do with it now.

He thought a lot about Jo and what it had been like to watch her the night that Meg had tried to kill her in Duluth. He had tried so damn hard to get Meg out of him, to keep Jo safe. They hadn't ever talked about it, not once. Dean had explained the whole possession thing, which was good, he supposed, but he wondered if she had ever truly forgiven him. He had seen the recognition in Jo's eyes when he'd named Meg. Maybe that was enough.

He wondered if all of this would have come down on them if he hadn't listened to his father's voice mail. If all of this was so preordained like the angels wanted them to believe, did that mean that Ellen and Jo were stuck and would have died for them one way or another?

What he wanted most was to hug and kiss Jo all over and thank her for his brother. The idea of seeing Dean shredded by hellhounds again was unbearable, but Jo . . . She gave him his brother back. The image of her insides struggling so hard to come out of her wasn't any better, and it killed him to have to feel this way. But she did. She kept him from reliving that one more time. He was never going to be able to thank her enough for that.

He had so much he wished he could have thanked Ellen for, too. She could never replace his mother, not in name, but she was the only experience he'd ever had with having someone close to one in his life. More importantly, in those last moments, she had given him his own mother back. The only times he had ever seen his mother, she had either been in flames or was about to be in Azazel's little game. He hadn't understood so much about who Mary was or why any of this was happening because of her, not until Ellen. Her unwillingness to leave, to give up being a mother . . . He thought he'd been as close to understanding he could get with Dean, but Ellen . . . He knew his mother now because of her.

How was he supposed to be able to thank them for that?

It might have been twenty minutes or it might have been an hour, but Sam hardly noticed when Dean sat on the step behind him, handed a beer down to him over his shoulder, and toed his shoulder. "You shouldn't be down here," Dean said quietly.

"I needed to think."

"Down here?"

"Yeah." Sam waited awhile, tugging on the beer label thoughtfully. He eventually pointed the mouth of it at the panic room door. "I started this."

"So did I."

"So what are we going to do about it?"

"No fucking clue."

"Well, at least we're on the same page," Sam said around the mouth of his beer.

They were quiet again for a while. Sam stared at the door and wondered again if there had been some way they could have avoided him seeing the inside of that room. He was tired of everyone telling him that he was meant to be there, that they had no choices, that they were destined. If this was what destiny held for them, as far as he was concerned, it was bullshit.

He felt the bottom of Dean's bottle touch his neck to pull him out of his thoughts. "Whatever we're going to do, it can't be about revenge. We need to be smarter than that."

"Dean, we're hunters. Our entire lives are about revenge. That's pretty much the whole job description."

"When we saw him, Chuck gave me some pages to read that he kept out of the books."

"Hello, non sequitur. You're telling me this now because?"

"They were pages he left out of _Mystery Spot_ because his editor worried that they would make you look too much like Dad. Apparently he was a really unpopular character."

Sam had to laugh at that. His father unpopular? He couldn't help but think John would find that amusing. Bobby would. John had a way of rubbing people the wrong way. But what had Sam done _before_ Dean's death that would be published that would remind people of Dad?

"You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?"

"Remind me."

"The finished version of the book has only one Wednesday in it."

That almost made Sam drop his bottle. Wow.

"That's why you were willing to talk to the Tricks—Gabriel? Because he brought me back?"

Sam shrugged. There were a lot of reasons, but explaining that time to Dean wasn't something he'd ever thought to do. He stood by his decision that it was something Dean didn't need to know. It was only a nightmare. Maybe Chuck was trying to be helpful, but all it meant was that it would be one more thing for Dean to worry about, one more thing that he hadn't told him. Most of all, he didn't like that Dean knew because, besides right after Jess, it was the first time Sam had ever truly wanted revenge for anything. It was the first time Sam had let himself feel that desperation to make right something that could in no way be made right. When he looked back on it and saw it as the first thing that made him trust Ruby enough to get her to help him with the deal and then his revenge, he didn't like what he saw. He was going to have to have a talk with Chuck about privacy.

For both himself and Dean he said, "You're right. I don't want revenge for Jo and Ellen. I think the best revenge is going to be not wanting revenge at all."

"You just said yourself, we're hunters. We're all about revenge."

"Maybe that's why we're in this mess in the first place."

"You think?"

"I do."

"Then what do you want to do about it?"

"I haven't figured that part out yet."

"Me neither."

III. Dean

He hadn't meant to blurt it out like that, about knowing about Sam and the six months he'd spent with Dean dead before he was supposed to die. He hadn't wanted to mention it at all, actually, as long as he didn't need to use the information. But with the talk of revenge and whose fault it was that they were there, it seemed like maybe Sam needed to know he knew. He was worried. He didn't want to be, but now that he knew his brother's capacity for revenge — both times he'd died — he needed to know where Sam's head was at. He had to admit, he kind of liked the answer he got.

What he'd actually come down to get Sam for, he didn't know how to approach.

He'd had a lot of time to think in the car with Cas driving. He could see his brother attempting to avoid thinking at all. Sam got this crook in his right eye when he wanted to not think about things that Dean had noticed from the time his brother was a kid. It was the only time he saw his brother not think about something. It didn't exactly surprise him now. If he could have escaped his own mind, he would have.

The thoughts were there, though, and they refused to let go. The terrified look in Jo's eyes had damn near done him in. If he didn't have a responsibility to other people — Bobby and Sammy pretty much the only people left on the list — he would have stayed with her. He hated seeing the finality in her. It wasn't that they would never have a chance now to figure out who they were, friends or family or more, but the idea that she was okay with where things were going to be left. How could she be okay with that? He was the one who was supposed to be okay with things. He was the one who was supposed to be dead and still in Hell and not bringing around angels and Lucifer and Hell on Earth.

There were times when that was what made him most angry — not that he had a new chance with his brother, but that Hell broke its end of the deal. Sammy alive, Dean in Hell for eternity to pay to bring him back: that was the deal. There was no small print about breaking seals and starting Armageddon. There had to be some sort of penalty for that, right? Sammy was Law Boy; he should have wondered the same thing. For all the shit he gave his brother about trusting demons, he had to wonder at his own stupidity on that one. If he had been thinking that night, he might have wondered.

But right now, he was most angry for Ellen and Jo. Sam was right; revenge wasn't going to get them through this one. The problem was that revenge was the only reaction they had ever been taught.

He'd thought that in the car. He thought of what it had been like to watch their father burn, a proper funeral, or as proper a funeral a guy can have when he died under a name that wasn't even his and could never officially be declared dead. He thought of all the things running through his head from the moment he learned the Colt was missing so close to his miraculous recovery. He thought of his anger at his father, of his want for revenge on the demon and on his father for putting him in the position he had. He thought of watching his father burn, his only father, and what he was supposed to do with that after.

So he'd decided, even before the suggestion of foregoing revenge, that what they needed to do was mourn. They didn't have much time for it, but it needed to be done. Because when it came down to it, that was what was going to separate them from these bastards up and down who were expecting them to fight their war for them. They could actually give a damn that two souls they had loved were gone. They could care that Jo wasn't going to ever know real love or have children or forgive them for leading them into the showdown in the first place. They could care that Ellen would, he hoped, be with her Bill again, and they could mourn the idea that they were never going to get to tell her how much they truly appreciated everything she had done for them. Those dicks couldn't do that.

There were no bodies to burn. They couldn't stand there and witness the sparks flying off into the heavens. They had nothing to bring home with them but their grief and tears.

He knew they had no family. After all, they were hunters. That's why hunters were hunters. But they had a Bobby, and they had Winchesters. It would have to be good enough.

So when they were able to get themselves together enough to do it, Dean brought the picture they had taken over to the fireplace and handed it to Bobby. There were no bodies, but they had something to burn. It had to be enough. It could be enough.

Watching them all burn on the funeral pyre, he swore he could feel them burning with the girls. It probably wouldn't be too long until that was the case. He wasn't sure if that made him feel better or worse.

Dean waited until Bobby fell asleep on the sofa, bottle too close to his hand, but he couldn't bring himself to take it away. They didn't have much to make this easier, so why take that one away?

He didn't say anything when Cas came back and sat alone at the kitchen table. The angel took a single shot and spent the rest of the night on watch, staring out the window for something that probably wouldn't come tonight.

He checked on his brother, too, but he backed quietly out of the room when he heard the guy crying softly into his pillow.

As he settled himself into Bobby's room, he told himself that when he woke up in the morning, he was going to look at what he had left, and he was going to think it was good. And then he was going to fight to keep it. It would be a good day. They needed one. As far as he was concerned, a good day was in their destiny.

He was going to salt the doors and windows, though, just in case.

(November 2009)


End file.
